30 August 2003

I could write about the unending misery out there in the wide world but I can't bring myself to do it this morning. The Marital Dog is visiting, and his liquid brown eyes greeted me before five this morning. He needed to go out. I was happy to take him. The world is good this morning. It is not raining now, though it will later, and I think the dog and I will take it easy. A young friend sent me a poem overnight and I fiddled with a response, working on meter with no rhyme and fixed some breakfast.

Scrolling through the New York Times I visited some of the first person accounts of 9-11 and decided I could not write about that. I had a long talk with the retired Admiral who is stage-managing the dedication of a memorial to our friend Dan in Chicago. There was a lot he didn't know about the events at the Pentagon, and he is eager for our little delegation to wear uniforms- dress whites or was it tropical whites? Even though we are quite retired, thank you kindly, and looking pretty sleek if we do say so ourselves. I wonder if I can find a set of whites that I can fit in? I hadn't thought this through. I thought the only point had only been to keep a set of Blues to get buried in.

I decided to put 9-11 aside for the moment. There will be enough of that when the day comes around and we travel to the dedication. There was an item about a new DVD coming out commemorating the 25 years since the release of one of the seminal films of our era, Animal House.

Aw, go ahead and laugh. I'm serious. Animal House was the prototype of all the quirky little youth films, "Something About Mary" and the "American Pie" series. It spawned a genre and the original made a hundred and forty million in real dollars. The article had an interview with John Landis, the director. He talked about softening up the script a little to make it less acid, more approachable. Landis is a year older than I am and he missed the whole fraternity thing. I only saw one year of it before the system died and went to cheery anarchy, so I knew a little more about it than he did. We had the big stone house on Washtenaw Ave, the Chi Phi House that began the long decline from a showplace to an amiable wreck. I showed my sons the place a couple years ago and their eyes got as wide as saucers where they saw the broken beer bottles and the trash gently blowing through the halls. I told them things always got a little disorganized in the summer and that things always returned to apple-pie order in the Fall.

They did, in the old days. The active Brothers had to get the place looking good for Rush, when they would dragoon a new class of pledges. The pledges, in turn, had to strip and wax the foyer linoleum and polish the wood. We had a cook and a handyman named Everett ("Pretty good, pretty good" was his all-purpose answer to any inquiry) But the order stopped in 1971 and declined. The place almost died but limped on as a place to live and party but not in the formal way that Landis lampooned. That was back in the early and mid-60s, when there were real fraternity men on campus with slicked-back hair and sport coats and ties and the Inter-Fraternity Council had teeth and double-secret probation was real.

My son is a DEKE. They were the Animal House on our Campus, though we were not far behind. I couldn't have pledged DEKE because they got into a little tiff with the University and bured their house down. They were suspended until everyone associated with the house had graduated or were sent to Vietnam. Now those were the days!

Landis mentioned adding the scene with the girls walking along the road after the segment with the frat boys in the blues bar. The enormous black man had the unforgettable line "Do you mind if we dance with your dates?" Landis told the Times that the original scipt just had the frat boys ruing away. He wanted to make sure we all knew that the girls were OK. I appreciated it at the time, knowing the girls were OK and nothing untoward had happened to them. Landis added it on the fly and he was right. Movies and movie-making are a trip. Maybe in another life I'll get to do that. This one seems quite full enough right now.

It has been 25 years since the movie came out, which would make it 1978. My fraternity of that time was the Medium Pursuit brotherhood of Fighter Squadron One Fifty One. There was a cast of characters in that outfit, and I have never been as tight as I was with those guys. The callsigns still resonate down the years. Rocket, Splash, Snidely Whiplash, Space, Hooch, Barnyard and Bronco. We were lead by our fearless leader, Rattler the MiG killer. We were in the Indian Ocean on our way to trouble or boredom and we didn't know which. I don't know how long it took the Navy Motion Picture Service to get the film to us, but they were pretty good about getting first-run films to the Fleet.

Oh, and it was a film, the reel deal, three reels that came in a big green pizza box with official-looking straps-and-buckels. We had to qualify to run the 35mm projector, learning how to loops the films above and below the light and get the sound track synched up properly. We even got a card certifying the fact that we could show Navy movies. It was a talent that stood me in good stead as long as that technology lasted.

Naturally, the new release is on DVD and I don't have to know how to do anything.

I can still do minutes of dialogue from the film ("You f__ked up, son, you trusted us...") but that was because we saw it maybe fifty or sixty times. There wasn't anything else to do out there in the evening after flight quarters were secured and the alert had been set.

But we had won the lottery and our squadron was going to be the first unit on the ship to see it. We were excited, but not as excited as things got later. It happened during one of the afternoon flight events. Big Bucks and Chief launched and had a hydraulic problem almost right off the cat. Bucks did the right thing and tried to blow everything down, landing gear, flaps and hook. Problem was that only one of the main mounts came down. This was not good.

Resolving the problem took another five hours. The rest of the airplanes recovered to let the Boss figure out how to get Bucks back home. There was some touchy refueling and a lot of looks at the back of the boat to see if they could get the airplane back aboard. and went round and round the boat trying to get the right main-mount to come down and not making it happen. They talked about erecting the barricade, a big nylon mesh net that stretched across the flight deck. he object was to crash the jet onto the deck and capture it as it slid out, even if the hook did not engage one of the arresting cables- the "cross-deck pennants."

But the big Phantom was just too fast and the emergency blow-down of the flaps didn't lock them down in the lowered position and they crept back up and the airplane just kept getting faster and faster. Despite the jerking and jinking, Bucks could not get the stuck wheel to come down. Lack of hydraulics meant he couldn't raise the other. So he was stuck. A pancake landing on the belly tank like Old Mean Bud did at the field at Misawa was out of the question, too.

There was another problem with the barricade. If the airplane hit it too fast it would rip it off the stanchions and out of the deck and then wrap itself around the cockpit and the airplane would keep going and dribble off the angle deck and into the water with the guys unable to eject.

They tried everything as afternoon turned to evening and then to black night. They put max power on the ship and we raced along as fast as we could go into the strongest wind we could find. Bucks lined it up for multiple passes to see how slow they could get the Phantom to come over the round-down and into the landing zone. They just couldn't get it anywhere slow enough.

The CAG couldn't send the guys ashore since there was no shore. We were truly Blue Water, a term by which we meant that there was no home but the ship, no alternative except the pitching deck in the black-ass night. We were somewhere near the Four Degree Channel in the Maldives. There was an old Brit field at Gan, but we were not exactly friendly with the locals and giving them a perfectly good fighter was not something the grownups wanted to do. So they decided to throw the airplane away and save the crew, if we could.

Bucks put the airplane in a big race track and they positioned the helos. We all were out on deck or in the catwalk watching. Chief pulled the handle and ejected on command abeam the ship, about a half mile out. The swimmers from the helo squadron got him almost before he got wet. Then it was Bucks' turn, driving a big convertible jet with the top gone. He got abeam the ship and then pointed it directly away. He clicked in five degrees nose-down and then pulled his handle and left the jet. He had a good seat and a good chute and that part of things were going very well. We watched the jet as the pressure of the wind on the left landing gear made it turn around in flight, almost coming back toward the ship. For a moment it looked like we might have an unmanned kamikaze and our guided missile cruiser USS Wordan thought she might have to engage the airplane, which would have been pretty spectacular. But the nose-down attitude did the trick and the F-4 went into the drink well off the stern.

They had a little problem finding Bucks, but he was OK and walked into Ready Two about twenty minutes later. The Flight Surgeon gave him one of those little bottles of whiskey they maintain as medical supplies. Not that there wasn't plenty more where that came from, locked away in the little safes in the officers staterooms. As my pal Mr. Sluggo said, "If they expect me to fly at night, I expect to have a glass of scotch when I get back."

The Admiral came down to the Ready Room to watch Animal House with us. He shook hands all around and when he was seated they rolled the film. "Faber College. Knowledge is Good."

Yes it is.

Copright 2003 Vic Socotra